COVID-19

A strange year for the country ran in sync with a strange year, personally, for writer Clive Martin: a summer of ElfBars, high street scrapes and confusion in mid-sized British towns that left him grappling with his own mortality.

Lateral flow tests became as rare as the latest shoe release or PlayStation 5. The bot’s “data nerd” creator tells us how government incompetence fuelled his project.

Generation Covid: Many girls may never return to school post-pandemic, while globally women lost $800 billion in income in 2020. Natasha Mudhar, founder of social impact enterprise The World We Want, reveals a gender-focused meaning to the title of our series.

As the first “post-pandemic” summer beckons, 14 to 23-year-olds reflect on the benefits of isolation and how it changed their lives – sometimes for the better.

We can’t trust the weather to be onside with our socialising plans. But post-lockdowns, nor, it seems, do we fully trust ourselves.

“I thought: ‘This is the Highlands, it’s so rural and we have such a low population, we won’t get it here.’ But now everyone’s got it.” THE FACE visits the far north of Scotland, to investigate the pandemic’s impact in Britain’s remotest corners.